Preah's Blog

(Guide) Intro To Social Blogging

Introduction

Social networks have rapidly become so vital to many people's lives on the internet. People want to see what their friends are doing, where they are, and photos of what they're doing. They also want to share these same things with their friends, all without having to go through the manual and sometimes awkward process of messaging them directly and saying "Hey, how're you doing?"

Developers and companies have complied with this desire for instant connection. We see the launch of Friendster in 2002, MySpace and a job-centered one we all know, LinkedIn, in 2003. Famously, Facebook in 2004, YouTube in 2005, Twitter (now X) in 2006. Followed by Instagram, Snapchat, Google+ (RIP), TikTok, and Discord.

People were extremely excited about this. We are more connected than ever. But we are losing in several ways. These companies that own these platforms want to make maximum profit, leading them to offer subscription-based services in some cases, or more distressing, sell their users' data to advertisers. They use algorithms to serve cherry-picked content that creates dangerous echo-chambers, and instill the need for users to remain on their device for sometimes hours just to see what's new, exacerbating feelings of FOMO and wasting precious time.

Facebook has been found to conduct experiments on its users to fuel rage and misinformation for the purpose of engagement.1 2 When did socializing online with friends and family become arguing with strangers, spreading misinformation, and experiencing panic attacks because of the constant feed of political and social unrest?

I don't expect anyone to drop their social media. Plenty of people use it in healthy ways. We even have decentralized social media, such as the fediverse (think Mastodon) and the AT Protocol (think Bluesky) to reduce the problem of one person or company owning everything. I think this helps, and seeing a feed of your friends' short thoughts or posts occasionally is nice if you're not endlessly scrolling. I also think it's vital to many people to be able to explore recommendations frequently to get out of their bubble and experience variety.

Blog Feeds

There is another option, one I am personally more fond of. It can sit nicely alongside your existing social media or replace it. It serves a different purpose than something like Twitter (X) or Instagram. It's meant to be a slower, more nuanced form of socializing and communicating, inspired by the pre-social media era, or at least the early one.

For the purposes of this guide, I will refer to this as "Blog Feeds." A little intro in one page can be explained by blogfeeds.net,3 which includes an aggregation of blogs to follow, essentially creating a network of people similar to a webring.4 This will help you explore new blogs you find interesting and create a tighter group. Another gem is ooh.directory, which sorts blogs by category and interest, allows you to flip through random blogs, and visit the most recently-updated blogs for ideas of who to follow.

Basically, a blog feed involves making a personal blog, which can have literally whatever you want on it, and following other people. The "following" aspect can be done through RSS (most common), or email newsletter if their site supports it. If the blog is part of the AT Protocol, you may be able to follow it using a Bluesky account. More about that later.

Making a blog

Making a blog sounds scary and technical, but it doesn't have to be. If you know web development or want to learn, you can customize a site to be whatever your heart desires. If you're not into that, there are many services that make it incredibly easy to get going. You can post about your day, about traveling, about gaming, theme it a specific way, or post short thoughts on nothing much at all if you want.

All I ask is that you do this because you want to, not solely because you might make a profit off of your audience. Also, please reconsider using AI to write posts if you are thinking of doing that! It's fully up to you, but in my opinion, why should I read something no one bothered to write?

Hosted Services:

Self-hosted, if you're more technical:

Honorable mention:

Wow, that's a lot of options! Don't get overwhelmed. Here are the basics for a simple site like Bear Blog or a static site generator.

You write a post. This post tends to be in Markdown, which is a markup language (like HTML) for creating formatted text. It's actually not too far from something like Microsoft Word. In this case, if you want a header, you can put a pound symbol # in front of your header text to tell your site that it should be formatted as one. Same with quotation blocks, bolding, italics and all that. Here is a simple Markdown cheatsheet provided by Bear Blog. Some other blogging platforms have even more options for formatting, like informational or warning boxes.

Examples of using Markdown

After you've written it, you can usually preview it before posting. While you're writing, you might want to use a live-preview to make sure you're formatting it how you intend. After posting, people can go read your post and possibly interact with it in some ways if you want that.

AT Protocol Blogging

I'm not going to attempt to describe AT Protocol when there is another post that does an excellent job. But what I am going to mention, briefly, is using this protocol to follow blogs via Bluesky or another AT Protocol handle. Using something like leaflet.pub, you can create a blog on there, and follow other similar blogs. Here is an example of a blog on leaflet, and if you have Bluesky, go ahead and test subscribing using it. They also support comments and RSS.

RSS

You don't have to memorize what RSS stands for (Really Simple Syndication, if you're curious). This is basically how you create a feed, like a Twitter (X) timeline or a Facebook homepage. When you subscribe to someone's blog,6 you can get a simple, consolidated aggregation of new posts. At this point, RSS is pretty old but still works exactly as intended, and most sites have RSS feeds.

What you need to start is a newsreader app. There are a lot of options, so it depends on what you value most. When you subscribe to a website, you put that into your newsreader app, and it fetches the content and displays it for you, among other neat features. Usually they include nice themes, no ads to bother you, and folder or tag organization. You may have to find a site's feed and copy the link, like https://blog.preahs.com/feed/, or your reader app may be able to find it automatically from a browser shortcut or pasting in the normal link for the website.

Here are some suggestions. Feel free to explore multiple and see what sticks:

Additional resource on RSS and Feeds.

Connecting everything together

Okay, soooo... I have a blog, I have RSS stuff, now what do I subscribe to, and how do I make this social? I'll let blogfeeds.net describe this:

This takes us to our final point: Feeds. You can probably get away with just the first two items and then sharing it with people you already know, but what about meeting or talking to people you don't know? That's where Feeds come in. The idea is to create another page on your blog that has all the RSS feeds you're subscribed to. By keeping this public and always up to date, someone can visit your page, find someone new and follow them. Perhaps that person also has a feeds page, and the cycle continues until there is a natural and organic network of people all sharing with each other. So if you have a blog, consider making a feeds page and sharing it! If your RSS reader supports OPML file exports and imports, perhaps you can share that file as well to make it easier to share your feeds.

Steve has an example of a feeds page, and blogfeeds.net has an aggregation of known blogs using feeds pages, to create a centralized place to follow blogs who have this same mindset. Once you make a feeds page, you can submit it to the site to get added to it. Then people can find your blog!

Interaction

There is debate on the best method for interaction with others via blogs. You have a few options.

<div class="reply-button-container">
  <a class="reply-button" href="mailto:preah@preahs.com?subject=Re: {{post_title}}">Reply via email</a>
</div>

And the accompanying CSS,7 which Bear Blog lets you edit:

.reply-button-container {
    margin-top: 30px;
}

.reply-button {
    display: inline-block;
    font-family: var(--font-main);
    font-size: 1em;
    color: #fff;
    background-color: var(--main-color);
    text-decoration: none;
    border: 2px solid var(--main-color);
    padding: 6px 14px;
    border-radius: 4px;
    transition: background-color 0.2s ease, border-color 0.2s ease;
}

.reply-button:hover {
    background-color: #cc0000;
    border-color: #cc0000;
}

For each post, I do change the subject line (Re: {{post_title}}) manually to whatever the post title is. That way, someone can click the button and open their mail client already ready to go with a subject line pertaining to the post they want to talk about.

Change the values background-color: and border-color: to whatever colors you want to match your site! See the bottom of this post to see what it looks like. Next:

Extras

Here are some ideas to get you started and inspired:

A /now page shares what you’d tell a friend you hadn’t seen in a year.

That's all from me for now. Subscribe to my RSS feed, email me using the button at the bottom to tell me this post sucks, or that it's great, or if you have something to suggest to edit it, and bring back the old web.

Reply via email

Footnotes

  1. Washington Post – Five points for anger, one for a ‘like’: How Facebook’s formula fostered rage and misinformation. Link. • Unpaywalled.↩

  2. The Guardian – Facebook reveals news feed experiment to control emotions. Link.↩

  3. This website was created by Steve, who has their own Bear Blog. Read Resurrect the Old Web, which inspired this post.↩

  4. A webring is a collection of websites linked together in a circular structure, organized around a specific theme. Each site has navigation links to the next and previous members, forming a ring. A central site usually lists all members to prevent breaking the ring if someone's site goes offline.↩

  5. Take a look at this Reddit discussion on why less JavaScript can be better.↩

  6. Or news site, podcast, or supported social media platform like Bluesky, and even subreddits.↩

  7. If you don't know what HTML and CSS is, basically, the first snippet of code I shared is HTML, used for the basic text and formatting of a website; CSS is used to apply fancy styles and color, among other things.↩

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